Stunning images keep emerging from NASA’s Artemis 1 lunar mission.
Artemis 1uninhabited Orion The capsule was home radioactive Great shots of Earth and its natural satellites Since it lifted off aboard a Space Launch System rocket on November 16.
NASA shared more of this eye candy on Wednesday (Dec. 7), in a Twitter post that celebrated another popular moon mission.
“50 years ago, Apollo 17 astronauts captured Earth’s iconic ‘blue marble’ view of the Moon as they watched the Moon. Today with #Artemis, this time-lapse footage shows the transit between Earth and Moon as @NASA_Orion captured our home planet and Moon on Day 13 flight,” NASA Johnson Space Center chirp (Opens in a new tab).
Pictures: Artemis 1 launch: Spectacular debut views on a NASA moon rocket
Flight day 13 was November 28, the day Orion ventured its furthest a land You’ll get it during the Artemis 1 mission. That distance — 268,563 miles (432,210 kilometers) — is the new record for a spacecraft designed to transport humans.
The previous distance marker was held by the near-disastrous NASA Apollo 13 The task she had to get around the moon Instead, it landed in April 1970 after suffering a serious failure shortly after liftoff.
Orion was still orbiting the Moon on November 28; It arrived in a retrograde lunar orbit on November 25 and departed from that orbit on December 1.
On December 5, the capsule burned an engine for 3.5 minutes during a flyby of the moon, a maneuver Put the capsule on its way to the ground. If all goes according to plan, Orion will return to its home planet with a splash in the Pacific Ocean on December 11, bringing the Artemis 1 mission to an end.
December 11th was also an important date for Apollo 17. On that day in 1972, astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt landed on the moon in their lunar module, called the Challenger. The duo explored the lunar surface for 75 hours before rejoining colleague Ronald Evans in the Lunar Orbit Command Module. The trio returned to Earth on December 19, 1972.
No astronaut has returned to the Moon since then, but NASA is working to change that with this Artemis program. The agency aims to launch astronauts around the moon on the Artemis 2 in 2024 and put the boots near the moon’s south pole a year or two later on the Artemis 3 mission.
Mike Wall is the author of “Abroad (Opens in a new tab)Book (Major Grand Publishers, 2018; illustration by Carl Tate), a book about the search for aliens. Follow him on Twitter @employee (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @employee (Opens in a new tab) or Facebook (Opens in a new tab).
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